MR | Fifth Edition, March 2014 – Post-Brewsvegas

For those outside Brisbane, it was a big week for those of us in the River City and one I’m not planning on repeating for, let’s say, another twelve months. In ammo’s absence last week, I worked at getting the Facebook page (go, like it now and positively reinforce my hard work) a bit of unique content instead of trying to drive it through the blog itself – just as an experiment – but we’re heading back to a more regular, sedate programming on the blog this week with a less hectic social media workload.

To Tweet of the Week!

.@BoakandBailey This. Exactly this. I want it on a t-shirt. I want to put it on billboards. I want to paint it on the moon.

I don’t know that I’d want to paint it on the moon (I mean, it looks fine the way it is, especially for its age), I do definitely agree with Boak & Bailey’s ideas. It’s a simple set of six ideas that sum up something I’ve been thinking for a while but haven’t expressed so succinctly. In short, it deconstructs the idea that small-scale is inherently good (or somehow morally superior) to macro industrial, which is always bad.

So what did others have to say last week? Despite the festivities, I managed to keep up-to-date and it was a big week in the blogosphere and some real media outlets. This week, presented without comment, simply because there’s nothing for me to add.

The number of phantom brewers is growing, and Mikkel, who got into the game in 2006, views this with a mixture of magnanimity and trendsetter’s pride. But he pays particularly close attention to one Brooklyn-based phantom brewery, because it is owned by his identical twin, Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergso. Jeppe started his brewery four years after Mikkeller began and, in an act of winking provocation, named the outfit Evil Twin. It is a smaller operation than Mikkeller, but similarly well regarded among connoisseurs. (Jeppe used to help Noma curate its beer selection.) The Bjergso brothers have opposite temperaments: Mikkel is reserved; Jeppe is an extrovert. And they are not on good terms, despite — or rather, because of — their shared infatuation with beer. They haven’t spoken to each other in more than a year.

You could do a blind taste test, and I’d put $1000 dollars on no one, not even the most refined Colt 45 connoisseur, being able to pick out Miller Fortune in a line up with Olde English 800, Hurricane High Gravity, and (my personal favorite) King Cobra. I should also note that MillerCoors owns the Olde English 800 brand, and it may have crossed my mind that all they did was pour some of that into different bottles, garnish it with a fancy ad campaign, and hope no one noticed. I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

Still, I persevered – determined to see whether I was drinking too much, what that would mean financially, and so forth. After writing about my first month on Alcodroid, would those patterns continue? Would it lead me to re-think my approach to the – arbitrary and merely suggested – guidelines of 21 units of alcohol per week? How many days over the 365 would I not drink at all? What would I do with myself then? And was there an app to record that, as well?

These days, the beer you’re seen with is as important as the watch you wear and the car you drive. It’s a direct representation of your personality – the more interesting the beer, the more interesting the drinker. This mentality makes craft beer one of the most rewarding industries to design for. Playing safe just doesn’t come into the equation.

I’m all for broadening peoples’ notions of what beer can be, but there’s an uneasy inconsistency in Stone’s off-and-on-again absolutism about some things: Greg’s fanatical anti-grey-market stance is awkward standing in front of a fridge featuring more than a few such bottles, and preaching about the unenlightened “on this very street” is a little strange in a bar that will happily — and rightly — sell them a faux-import Heineken right now. The event could’ve been staged in collaboration with (if not at, for reasons of scale) Hashigo Zake, for example, if moral purity was a paramount concern. And against all that reaching-out rhetoric, something like “Fizzy Yellow Beer Is For Wussies” clashes horribly. Not least because of the simple fact that several of the Stone beers on offer that evening were objectively-speaking both a) fizzy and b) yellow

Canada remains the largest export market, with shipments increasing 92 percent by volume (up to 131,511 barrels). Sweden (15.5 percent) and the United Kingdom (7.9 percent) are the next two largest markets, with Australia (5.4 percent) and Japan (3.2 percent) following, according to the Boulder, Colo.-based association.

“Exports of American craft beer continue to expand in the international market, reflecting craft brewing’s overall success as an industry,” association Chief Operating Officer Bob Pease said in a prepared statement.

But why did the guy pouring in a Santa Barbara area wine tasting room last week say, “Now, Mosaic, there’s a blueberry hop”? It’s certainly not the first time I’ve heard somebody say that. Or how about this description of the Harvest Single IPA at the Sierra Nevada web site? “Blueberry in a beer! The consensus? That’s flavor fit for a bottle.” OK, it doesn’t really bother me that much. There are plenty of reasons that smell is referred to as the “most enigmatic of our senses.”

I have experienced a number of humbling occurrences since I started blogging with 250beers.com. Yesterday was no different.

I received an email from the State Library of Queensland. Amongst a crap-load of other cool stuff that they do, the team build a comprehensive collection of Queensland publications to ensure the availability of our documentary heritage both now and in the future.